(DECLINE OF THE EAST DEPT.: Though Speer fleered and mocked at the very
thought of a book 2/5 of which was Ah! Sweet Idiocy! possessing any
balance, we here present a gesture in that direction: Joe Kennedy's two-part
history of New York area fandom at a time almost matching Laney's selected
time span. The first installment is from JoKe's own Green Thoughts
#2; the second, from the Insurgent issue of Spacewarp,
#42.)

New York Fan History

Part 1: Before the Bomb

by Joe Kennedy

(Part 1, from Green Thoughts #2 by Joe Kennedy
)

In the summer of 1943, the golden age for fantasy dealers had not yet
dawned. One could still pick up a complete set of Munsey Famous Fantastic
Mysteries in New York's Midtown Magazine shop, at two for a quarter
-- a price which was considered outrageous.

Fandom lived between issues of Le Zombie, in which the Cosmic
Circle fracas was always good for a sterling Pong sortie or two. Out in
Brooklyn, Julius Unger was dumping Fantasy Fiction Field into the
mails regularly; Dunkelberger was mimeographing it on yellow second sheets.
From England came Futurian War Digest, which J. Michael Rosenblum
was mimeographing on any paper stock slightly heavier than bathroom tissue.
Connor and Robinson had taken over Tucker's Fanewscard, a compact
and logical method of circulating fan tidings rapidly, which, although it
had no less than four imitators in 1944, has become quite extinct today.

FAPA was riding high, despite the draft and all the wartime shortages:
mailings were thick and the waiting list was long. To join FAPA was one
of my highest ambitions, but to a very new fan like me the prospects for
doing this were extremely slim. It seemed that FAPA members never quit and
rarely died.

To a neofan in '43, science fiction fandom was awe-inspiring -- a land,
as Moskowitz once put it, where every man could be king and every other
man his servant; a dazzling microcosm where an Indiana paranoiac could
proclaim,
"We are those whom Wells called the star-begotten." -- and find
a few people who'd take him seriously.

To adolescent fans, then as now, the hektograph was the usual medium
of fanzine duplication. There were in the metropolitan area perhaps half
a dozen youthful candidates for the Order of the Purple Hand, which Al
Weinstein
proposed to award any neofan who published a magazine with a jelly-pan.
To me the prospects of owning a mimeograph seemed as remote as Betelgeuse.

Though fandom was mostly manned by 4-fs, family men, and callow youths,
the war seemed far away. I seriously questioned SaM's assertion that to
be number one fan was not greater than to be President of the United
States.

At the age of thirteen, I had discovered stf just in time to buy the
last wartime issues of Super Science, Astonishing (one of
my favorites, as it cost but a dime) and Lowndes' Science Fiction
Stories.
I wrote some letters to the promags and began corresponding with people.
One day the mails brought a copy of Beowulf from Gerry de la Ree,
home again in Westwood, N. J., after his brief hitch in the navy. This resulted
in a correspondence with de la Ree, and in February '44, I visited him and
Russ Wilsey in Westwood. Wilsey, a Long Islander and a friend of Donald
A. Wollheim, chatted knowingly about the Cosmic Circle, the Futurians, and
the Chicon, which he had not attended. This was my first introduction to
East Coast fandom.

At this point, a slight digression: in de la Ree's pulpmag-lined den,
I saw several copies of a fantasy prozine which I have never seen mentioned
in the fan press. This was a semi-professional mag printed on slick paper,
which de la Ree said was published by somebody in Jersey. It was slim, but
of larger-than-pulpmag page size. Its contents were entirely fiction --
short-shorts of a weird or supernatural slant, I think. The distinguishing
feature of the magazine was that it was illustrated throughout with halftone
photos of pretty girls in bathing suits. In the copies Gerry had, most of
the photos of the pretty girls in bathing suits had been scissored out by
the mags' previous owner. The name of the magazine I don't remember, alas,
but it was definitely fantasy. If any bibliographers are interested, they
can probably obtain information about this from de la Ree or Moskowitz.
(Somehow I have a sneaking suspicion that I've mentioned this mystery prozine
in some fanzine before.)

Anyhow, I went home from Westwood all souped up about fandom. I melted
down my hektograph afresh, and began publishing a hand-lettered imitation
of Fanewscard, entitled QX the Cardzine, which appeared every
two weeks for the next ten months.

I continued corresponding with Wilsey, and began swapping letters with
several other New Yorkers, who kept me supplied with news tips for QX.
The eventual result was that in August '44, the so-called "Dovercon"
was held at my place. This affair was noteworthy mainly for its bringing
together Wollheim and Moskowitz, and received at the time an incredible
amount of publicity, despite the fact that only eleven people attended it.

Sam had just been released from the army on a medical discharge. He boomed
forth his experiences in the tank corps at great length yet spellbindingly.
The Dovercon also marked the first appearance on the fan scene of
thirteen-year-old
George Fox, whose brash wit and acid commentaries were later to make him
a sort of gadfly to the Eastern SF Association, of which organization he
is technically the founder.

Paul Miles, another attendee, had a special claim to glory. He had sold
a story to Palmer. Some collector with an encyclopedic memory might recall
the short-short "Bill Caldron Goes to the Future", in one of the
1943 Amazings [March -- r.e.] that also featured "The New
Adam".
"Bill Caldron etc" was a typically boyish attempt to write a
time-travel
story, but its unaffected humor is genuinely funny. Whatever possessed Palmer
to buy it I wonder to this day, for most of his jerky readers took the story
in utter earnest, and panned hell out of it -- though it did draw praise
from a few discerning souls, among them Raym Washington. Miles, a resident
of Trenton, Michigan, had come East for a ten-day visit with me, during
the course of which we went in to the city and annoyed W. Scott Peacock,
editor of Planet.

Conversation at the Dovercon pointed out the need for a NYC-New Jersey
fan organization -- which was not fated to materialize until April, 1946,
when the ESFA was officially born. Unger was reportedly planning a gala
science-fiction banquet. This never did come off. The Cosmic Circle was,
by the time of the Dover gathering, nearly dead. The slightest mention of
it was enough to provoke smiles. We neophytes, however, took great joy in
belaboring the dead horse, and whenever material ran short, such adolescent
fan journals as Ad Infinitum and Stellar invariably filled
their pages with stale jibes about Don Rogers and his cosmic love camp in
the Ozarks.

Fresh from the west coast, Mike Fern had taken up residence in New York
and had soon become notorious for his bad manners. On one occasion while
enjoying the hospitality of Julie Unger, Fern had reportedly borrowed Unger's
typewriter, on which he wrote a letter to Laney, filled with abuse of Unger
and his family. Fern had then given the letter to Unger to read!

"But Julie," Moskowitz had asked. "Didn't you have any
objections when he called your wife a slattern?"

To which Unger allegedly replied: "So what? So it means she can't
read and write so good?"

When the summer of '44 drew to a close, I had acquired enough money by
scrubbing presses for a local newspaper to buy a typewriter. This greatly
strengthened my publishing facilities. QX abandoned its hand-lettered
format, and I began making plans for the day when I could drop the cardzine
entirely and attempt a full-size fan journal.

For months I had been hearing glowing reports of meetings of The Arisians,
an informal New York fan club of which Wollheim was unquestionably the
unofficial
chief. Meetings were always held at the Wollheims' apartment. In addition
to the horde of young fans, many of DAW's Futurian friends like Lowndes,
Michel, Kubilius, Bok and his mistress, and others had put in appearances.
I was at this time a scant fifteen years of age, and when a postcard invitation
arrived from Wollheim himself to attend the September meeting, it was as
momentous an occasion as if I had received a personal invitation from God
Almighty to come over and visit Him and Saint Pete.

The society had been named after the elder race in EESmith's saga, and
to a bright-eyed neofan that September '44 meeting did seem like a gathering
of demigods. The towering apartment houses of Forest Hills, Long Island,
were impressive indeed to an adolescent who'd grown up in a town where the
tallest building is three stories high. In the Wollheim's sunken living
room, a dozen people could comfortably sprawl. One could ogle Bok and Finlay
originals, and paw over DAW's collection of perhaps a thousand fantasy volumes
and virtually every fantasy pulp that ever spewed from a press. Fanzines
were stashed away in a large cabinet which, I believe, was generally kept
locked during meetings.

Smaller bookcases held bound volumes of all the pulps edited by Wollheim
and the other Futurians. There were bound copies of The Phantagraph
and other fanzines. There was even a copy of The Gholy Ghible --
carbon-copied, one of the three in existence -- and I hastened to inspect
it. Written in pseudo-biblical style, it seemed to be mostly egoboo for
its Futurian highpriests and hefty slams at Sykora. I angered DAW by suggesting
that the title of the Ghughuist holy book be rendered more fantastic by
renaming it "the Ghouly Ghible". 'What good would that be?' snapped
Wollheim. 'There's nothing about ghouls in it!'

The phonograph blared forth the Bolero and the Don Cossack chorus singing
"Meadowlands". Wilsey was everywhere, uncorking sarsaparilla bottles,
administering hotfoots, puffing a cigar, and laughing a bit more loudly
than necessary.

In one corner sat the glum but brilliant Bill Stoy, who together with
Chad Oliver, Milt Lesser, Gene Hunter, and Paul Carter, was probably one
of the most celebrated letter hacks of modern times. Stoy it was who had
composed the code of the Arisians, which was dutifully published in the
club's oneshot official organ, La Vie Arisienne.

Larry Shaw peered behind thick spectacles. It was around this time, if
memory is correct, that Shaw had quit his $15-a-week job as a New York
Times copyboy, returned disgustedly to Schenectady, then had drifted
back to Manhattan once more, where he stayed. Though Shaw had given up
Nebula,
the excellent news sheet which he'd carried on for Rusty Hevelin, he was
at this time a leading light in FAPA. His publications were usually graced
by the excellent freehand drawings and headings which deeply impressed me,
and which, in the later issues of Vampire, I tried to emulate.

Al Weinstein was a faithful Arisian attendee. One of my earliest
correspondents,
Weinstein was perhaps too well adjusted to the world at large to submerge
himself long in the fannish microcosm. Nonetheless, his fanzine Ad
Infinitum
saw five steadily-improving issues, and published material by Bob Tucker,
Harry Warner, Ron Clyne, Jay F. Chidsey, Henry Elsner, Sam Mason and me.

Then there was Austin Hamel, a goodlooking and personable fifteen-year-old,
whose brief passage through fandom has left little trace behind. Hamel is
perhaps best remembered for Stellar, a publication which bade fair
to rival Degler's mags for the title of the worst legible fanzine of all
time. Weinstein, Ron Maddox, and I had visited Hamel in the Bronx, and were
shown a large closet stacked with early Gernsback Wonders and
Amazings.
Yet during the Arisian gathering, he continually cast glances toward the
window, and I mentally compared him to a caged sparrow. Once he dolefully
remarked, 'What the hell am I doing here? I could be out playing baseball.'
His subsequent return to the mundane world did not much surprise me.

Completing the gathering were Monroe Kuttner, a very young fan who has
been popping in and out of East Coast fan activities for several years now,
and Rosemarie Riewald, an intellectual bobbysoxer who, together with Sam
Mason and Janvier Hamell, then comprised the short-lived "Philadelphian
Futurians".

Wollheim was editing Ten Detective Aces at the time. He has at
one time or another edited just about every category of pulp mag, I believe.
One day, he reminisced, when he was editing Baseball Action Stories
or some such pulp (I am not sure of that title) he was asked by a fellow
employee what he thought of the series. "What series?", the editor
of Baseball Action Stories replied.

"There was a time," he said, "when nearly every sports
magazine in New York was edited by science fiction fans who hated
sports."

Arisian gatherings were, of course, primarily social, secondarily
scientifictional,
and never political. I do recall Wilsey's remarking that he was studying
Russian so he could accompany DAW on a postwar visit to Moscow. However,
most of the afternoons were spent, as Weinstein once remarked in Ad
Infinitum,
in "debating whether or not Ackerman is human, why the Yankees lost
the pennant, how Wilsey's ears grew so enormous, and sundry other intelligent
eruptions." After the September meeting, there was an excursion to
a Chinese restaurant near Times Square. I was quite proud of being the first
Arisian elected to membership on a subway train.

In addition to the little band of the faithful, a number of other luminaries
showed up at the October gathering, the second and final Arisian meeting
that I attended. Among the first to arrive were Damon Knight, Chester Cohen,
and Suddsy Schwartz, the latter wearing a sweater over the front of which
a bowl of oatmeal appeared to have been spilled. Suddsy told the story of
the rooster that wore red pants, and flashed a photograph which he said
he'd purchased from Tucker -- a nude sprawled on a couch, draped only in
copies of Startling Stories.

Frank Wilimczyk was there. Wilimczyk I knew as the publisher of the fine
general fanzine, Paradox. I remember very little about him, other
than that he didn't have much to say, and seemed embarrassed when I attempted
to rise from a couch and couldn't do it because he was sitting on the tail
of my coat.

Wilsey sang a little jingle to the tune of "I'm a Little
Teapot"!

I'm a little Cosfan, short and dumb;
Here is my brain, as big as my thumb.
When I get all steamed up, I do shout,
"Ashley is a dictator! Unger is a lout!"(*)

John Michel arrived, accompanied by a dark-haired girl whom he'd met
in the Village -- Judy Zissman, later to become a charter member of the
Vanguard a.p.a. Michel was editing some aviation magazine at the time, and
one of his duties was to comb all the morning newspapers for news items
about airplanes.

The meeting occurred during the Roosevelt-Dewey election campaign and
I was wearing an old Coolidge-and-Dawes election button which I'd rooted
out of the attic. Michel inspected the thing gravely.

The thought struck me that the Futurians had all but developed a small
culture-inside-of-a-culture all their own. Not only did this have its own
burlesque religion, its literature and philosophy, but its own language
as well. Some youngfan, browsing through the bound fanzines, discovered
something written in Dawnish, the synthetic language which the Futurians
had presumably invented as a takeoff on Esperanto. When queried how one
might acquire this curious tongue, Wollheim replied, "We'll teach you.
Ten dollars a lesson. A hundred easy lessons or fifty hard."

The whimsy for which the Futurians were famous was still evident. A sober
discussion was held concerning the fate of six pieces of paper which had
reportedly been rolled beneath the drum of Michel's mimeo into a spacewarp,
and never appeared on the other side. Some of the FAPA members considered
the possibility of producing 65 small bowls of jello, with articles and
poems and stories engraved in fine type upon the gelatin. DAW laughed hugely
when I announced a fanzine to be called Terrifying Test-Tube Tales.
I don't know whether I ever told him that the title was inspired by Stirring
Science Stories.

During all these goings-on, both Don and Elsie Wollheim treated the
attendees
very cordially, and, indeed, their toleration for young fans was considerably
greater than we had a right to expect. I have never figured out why Wollheim
formed the Arisians. It may have been that, as a well-established professional
editor, he enjoyed being the acknowledged leader of a group of neophytes;
or possibly he had ideas of becoming once again a power in fan politics.
I don't know. It was certain that at the time he was becoming increasingly
dissatisfied with FAPA, as evidenced by his oneshot fanzine Vertigo,
which was distributed only by subscription.

After the Vanguard Amateur Press Association was begun in March, 1945,
the Arisians waned. The face of New York Fandom had changed. Things were
shaping up for the big Futurian split which finally came in September. Then,
too, a lot of new fans like Hamel and Weinstein disappeared. The great invasion
from Los Angeles began, with Kepner, Brown, and others moving to New York,
where they gravitated toward the elder faction of the split Futurian Society,
and Kepner began writing blasts against Astounding Science Fiction's
capitalism for The Daily Worker. The atom bombs exploded, too, around
this time.